The Big "O" Isn't Orgasm
"What is the mechanism by which love and affection positively affect health?" The answer to this question is oxytocin.
Oxytocin is a hormone and neurotransmitter. Once believed to confine its effects to inducing labor and milk ejection, oxytocin actually has far-reaching effects on both sexes. You could not fall in love without it. These days it goes by nicknames such as "the bonding hormone," "the cuddle hormone," and even "the love hormone." The primary conscious behavior or thought process that increases oxytocin is caring for another. Appreciation, generous touch, gratitude, and emotional connections with others also raise oxytocin levels. In addition, oxytocin appears to be behind many of the health benefits from meditation, massage and acupuncture.
We see one of oxytocin's most powerful effects at birth--when the mother and father bond with their child. At that moment, oxytocin surges causing a rewiring of both parents' brains so that they will do anything for their little screaming creature. Under ordinary circumstances they remain permanently in love. We all form similar connections with friends, lovers, cats, gurus, or even God. And the benefits to us of these deep connections are great.
Oxytocin is the reason why people with pets tend to recover more quickly from illness, why married people tend to live longer, why support groups benefit those with cancer, addictions and chronic disorders, and why care-giving primate parents, whether male or female, live longer than the non-care-giving parents. How can oxytocin exert such tremendous health benefits?...
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Have A Laugh at the Gender Gap
In the beginning, God created earth and rested. Then God created man and rested. Then God created woman. Since then, neither God nor man has rested.
I haven't spoken to my wife for 18 months. I don't like to interrupt her.
I married Miss Right. I just didn't know her first name was Always.
Just think, if it weren't for marriage, men would go through life thinking they had no faults at all.
Letters from the Trenches (c.1900)
Dear Dr. Stockham,
I am a young man, 24 years of age, enjoying the most vigorous health. For two years after becoming engaged I delayed marriage, simply because I did not think my income sufficient to support a wife and the children which I regarded as an inevitable consequence. Happily for me a friend, who knew my circumstances, wrote me about Zugassent's Discovery [i.e., Karezza, or making love without orgasm].
The ideas contained in this discovery were so different from all my preconceived ideas of what constituted marital happiness, that I was inclined to reject them as utterly impracticable and absurd. But the more I thought of the matter the more clearly I saw that if there was a possibility of these new ideas being true, they were exactly adapted to a man in my circumstances, and that they made my marriage immediately practicable. The wholly new thought that retaining the vital force within himself would naturally make a man stronger, clearer and better also seemed to me not irrational.
With some misgivings, therefore, I determined to venture upon marriage, and it has been completely successful. I have had a continuous honeymoon for four years. I have never been conscious of any irksome restraint or asceticism in my sexual experience; and my self-control and strength, mental and physical, have greatly increased since my marriage. In the light of my own experience I regard the idea that the seminal fluid is a secretion that must be got rid of as being the most pernicious and fatal one that can possibly be taught to young people. J.G.
PEACE BETWEEN THE SHEETS News
Book Review - InnerChange Magazine
Marnia Robinson has researched the split and tension in modern relationships between men and women. Her solution - a return to the ancient ways of intimacy. Rather than devouring each other and leaving each other empty and feeling a depressing sense of lack, Robinson offers us not just theory but the how-to of healing with sexual relationships. The healing is not just physical and mental but spiritual. The final chapter of Section I, before the how-to of the Ecstatic Exchanges in Section II, describes a Divine connection - one which the ancient Taoists and Tibetan Buddhists have always known. You cannot be selfish and generous at the same time; you cannot be hungry and nourished at the same time. Therefore, with the sexual energy transmuted through the heart center to nourish each other, the flow of abundance in life balances with the life force and merges us not just with our partners but with the Source from whence we came.
Close Relationship Helps Heart
Patients had 50% less risk of dying from heart disease within the year of their initial hospitalization for a heart attack if they had a close personal confidant. Those without a close confidant were more likely to have had a prior history of a heart attack and to have been smokers. They were more likely to have more severe heart attacks and more complications related to the heart attack. They also were more likely to drink heavily, use illegal drugs, and smoke. It's the degree of intimacy of close relationships -- not the number of social contacts -- that appears to protect heart health, Creek explains. A close confidant is "usually a spouse or partner, but not necessarily," he tells WebMD. "It may be a very, very close friend or relative."
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Finding the Kingdom of Heaven in Your Own Hearts
With Karezza, satiety is never known, and the married are never less than lovers; each day reveals new delights….The common daily sarcasms of married people are at an end, the unseemly quarrels have no beginnings and the divorce courts are cheated of their records.
More than a century ago, a remarkable woman coined the term "Karezza" (Italian for "caress") in her book, Karezza: Ethics of Marriage. Alice Bunker Stockham, MD counsels avoiding orgasm during sex for the same reasons as does Peace Between the Sheets, namely: better health, and greater harmony and spiritual attainment.
Stockham was a Quaker born in 1833 on the American frontier, which, at that time, included her native Ohio. She grew up in a log cabin in close proximity to Native Americans, whom she regarded with respect. She became one of the first five US women doctors when she graduated from the only institute of higher learning in the West to admit women. She married a doctor and they had two children.
Although she was a general practitioner, she specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. Fifteen years before she wrote Karezza, she authored a popular text entitled Tokology (Greek for "Obstetrics"). Written for lay readers, it covered all aspects of women's and children's health and was far ahead of its time. For example, she recommended natural childbirth, eating a high-fiber diet, exercising during pregnancy to promote a pain-free childbirth, using the mind to heal illness, and, above all, doing away with corsets! She boldly advocated sexual continence during pregnancy and to prevent pregnancy, which brought her into conflict with the authorities as it was illegal to promote birth control. She argued that the widespread belief that women should be legally forced to participate in ejaculatory sex - lest they go to any length to avoid the travails of childbirth - was nonsense.
She also traveled extensively, and Tokology was translated into French, Finnish, German and Russian (with a forward by Leo Tolstoy). Ultimately she founded her own publishing company to publish forward-thinking works. Stockham was a multi-faceted reformer. Inspired by the Swedes, she is credited with introducing workshop classes into American schools. In addition, she provided copies of Tokology to penniless women and former prostitutes to sell door-to-door to earn their livings (including with each volume a certificate for a free gynecological exam at her clinic). She was very active in studying spirituality and the power of the mind, practiced homeopathy, believed in both the fatherhood and motherhood of God, was in favor of temperance, served as a trance medium, and was an active suffragette.
However, her zeal for sacred sexuality is surely her most intriguing facet. Around the time the first tantra books were translated into English, Stockham traveled to India where she visited a matrilinial caste of hereditary warriors, allegedly of Brahmin descent, on the Malabar Coast. Known as "the free women of India," Nayar women were intelligent, well-educated, and all property descended through them. They controlled the business interests and chose their own husbands. There she may have learned about tantra....
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